SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company is implementing a data lake on Amazon S3. The security policy requires that all data be encrypted at rest using AWS KMS and that access must be logged. The data lake has millions of objects, and the security team wants to detect any changes to bucket policies or encryption settings. Which combination of services should be used?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse AWS Config (which tracks configuration compliance) with CloudTrail (which logs API calls), failing to realize that Config does not log access events, so it cannot satisfy the 'access must be logged' requirement alone.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
AWS CloudTrail for management events and Amazon S3 server access logs
AWS CloudTrail management events log changes to S3 bucket policies and encryption settings (e.g., PutBucketPolicy, PutBucketEncryption), while S3 server access logs provide detailed object-level access records. Together, they satisfy the security policy's requirements for detecting configuration changes and logging access, without needing additional services.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon CloudWatch Events and Amazon S3 event notifications
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch Events can react to events but does not provide full audit logs.
- ✗
Amazon CloudWatch Logs and VPC Flow Logs
Why it's wrong here
CloudWatch Logs is not designed for S3-specific logging; VPC Flow Logs capture network traffic, not S3 events.
- ✗
AWS Config and AWS CloudTrail
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config tracks resource configuration changes but does not log access events.
- ✓
AWS CloudTrail for management events and Amazon S3 server access logs
Why this is correct
CloudTrail records S3 API calls for bucket-level actions; S3 server access logs provide object-level access details.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
Related to this question
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAP-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SAP-C02 exam.